text reminders

[Xstew]

Anybody have suggestions on a good text/email reminder service that integrates with OD?

[edneum2]

We find OD's recall system handles emails well. As for text, today we started the trial version of http://www.mopensoft.com/download.html. There's a post about it as well viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5857. We already had our first successful reminder and seems to work great. Everything integrates and can be operated from within OD.

[allends]

http://opendental.com/manual/version15_3.html

In version 15.3 we have released a texting feature that is integrated into OpenDental itself.
It might be something you are interested in if you don't want to go looking for a third-party solution.

[pid_user]

http://opendental.com/manual/version15_3.html

In version 15.3 we have released a texting feature that is integrated into OpenDental itself.
It might be something you are interested in if you don't want to go looking for a third-party solution.

Please share the pricing of this new feature in OpenDental

[jsalmon]

Please share the pricing of this new feature in OpenDental

"$5/month/location, plus $0.04 per message sent"
http://www.opendental.com/manual/fees.html
http://www.opendental.com/manual/textintegrated.html

[KevinRossen]

First off, this is a great new feature! I have a question about confirming appointments. I see in the manual it shows "Text C to confirm" or something similar. If a patient does reply will the appointment automatically be confirmed or will it be a manual process.

Also, just ran some numbers for our practice. Based on the volume of text we are sending this would end up costing us about $80/mo (we send a lot of texts), so we'll likely stick with our current service (PracticeMojo) as it's been fine tuned for us.

[Hersheydmd]

I am using Patient Communicator (previously known as Total Recall Solutions) (http://aboutus.mypatientcommunicator.com/) for automated appt reminders & confirmations, birthday wishes, recall e-mails & texts, e-mail campaigns, and 2-way texting. It works great and they have excellent customer support, which is something I've gotten used to being an OpenDental user. Texting is included - no additional charges per text.
I also use Google Voice for free texting. There are posts on this forum with instructions on how to set it up.

[eschoud2]

We have been using Google Voice for a while but just started using the mOpenSoft plugin. The plugin is $89/year and lets us use Google Voice without leaving Open Dental. Pretty good deal.

[Mifa]

Just out of curiosity, as I ran into this when I implemented the Diafaan solution a few months ago: how do you handle incoming text messages when several patients share the same cellphone number?

[mopensoft]

Not sure there's a complete solution for that with Diafaan. ATM, I just add commlog to each of them to keep the record since you do not know what outgoing message is replied. I think, you can add a note to each message sent out and track the date to guess the most possible to be reply. In the imcoming message, there's a message_id, might be useful.

Other provider like SMSGlobal, you can track the incoming message history and know the original outgoing to find exact matching.

[Rickliftig]

We just installed text messaging yesterday, but something is not right (15.3.5). Some phones/cell companies are receiving the messages and others are not. They are all noted as delivered. Any ideas Jason?

Also:

When the message is received by the patient it lists a non-descript number as the "sent from" ; Is there any way to have the practice name sent along?

[Ryan]

The phone number that the patient's see is the phone number that is assigned to your practice. It should not change and your patients should be able to add it to their phone books. Open Dental cannot currently send the practice name instead of a phone number, but you can add the practice name to the outbound text messages manually until your patients are familiar with your phone number.

The status being noted as delivered means that Open Dental received confirmation that the messages were delivered. What network and region were you trying to send the messages to that failed? I can see if there is anything we can do to fix it.

[Rickliftig]

Thanks for the reply Ryan -

Here's the detail:

Everyone is in Connecticut;
ATT/iphone 5 - No
Sprint/Android - No
Verizon/flip phone - Yes
Sprint/Galaxy 3 - No

Ideas?

[Rickliftig]

FYI anyone reading this thread: I got a call from Mark at Open Dental about an hour after posting and the staff is working on the issue. We went back and forth doing a little testing. But kudos to the OD staff for being proactive and their attention to the problem!

[nathansparks]

Thanks for being a beta tester on this Rick. The issue you had with some texts not going through seems to have been related to the outbound number: we do not have control over previous 'abuse' of a number (most numbers have some history at this point) that may have caused issues with carriers, but we are going to build in a tool to allow Open Dental users to test the number first (at signup) and switch numbers if needed. The number pool we are using should not be any different that that used by other providers, and we do not share your number with other users: so if a number is subsequently banned by particular carriers it will not be due to someone else sending spam, so I hope this model is superior. I will add some more to this thread once we have activated the testing tool.

[Rickliftig]

Seems to be working at this point, Nathan.

To clarify, for anyone wondering, as phone numbers have been re-assigned over the years, a few of them had been previously flagged as 'spammers'. Consequently, they were blocked. Since the OD text service uses a third party phone number (and not your own), each number needs to be tested before use.

It's a great feature that we have all been waiting for.

Rick